Miscommunication
by Makori
Summary: Things have finally slowed back down for the gang.  The last thing they're expecting is something wolrdbreaking to happen.  And then, an airship from across the ocean crashlands near them, throwing them into a second war of confusion.  Several pairings.


(A/N: Okay, I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for I don't know how friggin' long, and I just decided to go ahead and write it. It's a cross between ATLA and the game Rise of Legends. If you don't know what that is, go to their website from Google or Microsoft. It's just a question that was in my head: what happens when bending meets science? And for your information, I intend for almost all the Vinci soldiers to get wiped out before the end, so none of this 'ooh, guns are superior over magic tricks' crap. Iwant to prove that guns aren't superior to everything like a lot of people think. One last thing, this one chapter is going to be written from the Vinci point of view, and except for a few spots here and there to convey certain character's thoughts, it will all be written from the Bending Gang's POVs.)

Disclaimers: I am not the genii who own either Avatar: the Last Airbender or Rise of Legends. If I was, I'd already have finished Book 3.

**Miscommunication**

Prologue: Crash Landing

_Somewhere on the Northwestern Coast of the Earth Kingdom_

The coast itself was mostly uninhabited, despite the large population and coverage of the Earth Kingdom. Only a few small fishing villages here and there populated the near empty coast, which was still risky, seeing as how the Fire Nation was so close. There was one village in particular that had been lucky enough to discover a wall of cliffs with small canyons that hid them from view, whether on land or out at sea, and because of this they were one of the largest villages in that area, despite only having a total population of roughly sixty people. Their lifestyle was relaxed, so much that they didn't ever really panic if someone spotted smoke on the horizon or heard reports of Fire Nation troops on the march nearby.

However, on this particular day, there was an added tension, for some reason, even though today seemed the same as every other.

An old man, being a fisherman like everyone else, was currently sitting in his small boat out in a spot on the other side of the cliffs from the fishing grounds. This area was teeming with fish, and no one else knew about it, and all the old man had to do was cast his nets out, then sit back and relax. Today, however, something kept making him glance to the North. It was like a premonition of some disaster coming, like the silence before a battle. The old man dismissed it as paranoia, trying to get into a good position to sleep, not aware that he was about to view a land mark event the likes of which had never before been seen.

The old man was still trying to sleep two hours later when something made his head tilt up and turn towards the North once more. This time, he thought he actually heard something. A rumbling, like an earthquake, but not from the land or the sea. Instead, it seemed to come from the sky, and it wasn't thunder, since the sky was perfectly clear. As he watched, he thought he saw something like a shadow appear on the horizon.

The old man groped around in a crate for a bit before extracting an old, battered spyglass. He out it to his eye, then focused it on the shadow thing. He kept it there for twenty minutes while it got bigger and bigger and more and more defined. However, when it came into clear enough definition that he could see what it was, he dropped the spyglass in panic, then stumbled over to the sails, trying to hoist them up so he could run, flee, get away. But the nets were still out, and it would take at least ten minutes to haul them in, and that thing was getting closer and closer, and the rumbling was getting louder and louder. He hurriedly pulled on the nets, but it took too long. Finally, when the rumbling was so loud he was sure everyone in the village was hearing and seeing the thing too, he simply jumped over board and started swimming away from his boat as fast as he could.

The rumbling was coming from a steam engine, but not the like of the Fire Nation, for they hadn't yet figured out how to fly anything bigger than a spotter balloon, had they? In any case, the gigantic form currently going over the sea, then the village, and then continuing over the land, was grey, not black, and although there were some parts of it that were red, nowhere was the Fire Nation insignia. Flying over these fisherman was something no one had ever seen the likes of: a giant zeppelin, with a foreign symbol on both sides and an engine the likes of which the Fire Nation could never create. This was something alien, bizarre, and although it left the fishermen alone, many of the villagers began panicking and quickly evacuated the village, sure that whoever was on board would drop their troops and attack.

_On Board the Zeppelin_

Yet the people on board did not attack, did not stop, barely even gave the village much of a glance. Instead, the giant grey monster continued on its way. In the passenger space on the underbelly, the crew and soldier all worked together in the cramped space. Down in the gondola, surveyors were using monoculars, monocles strapped to their heads with the same capabilities as binoculars, to view the landscape beneath them and take notes. The soldiers were more worried about helping the crew maintain the engine and the gas in the enormous gasbag over their heads than the view beneath them. They were running low on fuel, and everything that could be used to substitute coal or wood, minus tools, weapons and equipment, was being stuffed into the furnace. Chairs, table, crates, desks, even the mattresses from the cabins went in. Every last drop of water had been poured into the water tank for steam, and it was almost empty. The gas bag itself had seen better days. There was a large gash, half as big as a man, in the material, only a few meters above the cabins. There was no doubt in anyone's minds: they were going to crash. The pilots were working feverishly to bring the airship down as close as they could to the ground so they could try and land, but everywhere they saw was taken up by trees.

The only people not panicking were the commander of the soldiers and the man, in charge of the expedition. The commander, a major in rank, was calm, in spite of the events happening, leaning against a window in the gondola and sipping at a bottle of wine in his hand with a small smile on his face.

He turned to the expedition leader and said, with a few gestures to accompany, "Eh, Antonio, why you so tense, man?"

The language spoken was quick, and some of the words seemed to meld together into one, and any person who talked seemed to also gesture a lot, as though that were also part of the language.

The man being addressed, Antonio, turned to the soldier, an irritated look on his face, and replied, quietly "I dunno what you're talking about, Giovanni." Actually, he was only about seventeen years old, but no way did it look like he was a noble or a prince or something. More like a kid running away from home.

The major laughed and took another sip, saying "Well, you got enough worry on your face to rival my mother when she was pregnant with my little sister. C'mon, these people are the pros, you hired them, didn't you?"

Antonio huffed and said "Not even professionals could have prevented this."

Giovanni chuckled and shook his head a little, saying "No one knew the ocean was this wide."

Suddenly, bellows of alarm rang up and down the zeppelin:

"We're out of fuel!"

"Of what, wood or water?"

"Both!"

Antonio and Giovanni both turned at this, frowning. Giovanni, being more used to having dire situations thrust upon him, down the rest of his wine, turned to the pilot and asked "How far are we above the ground?"

The man was sweating with panic as he clutched the wheel, but he still responded by glancing at the altimeter before yelling out "Two hundred meters above sea level!"

It was getting very hard to talk over not only the confusion, but also over the sound the zeppelin was making as it sped nose first towards the ground.

Giovanni sighed and yelled back "Yeah, and how far above the _land_ is that?"

The pilot didn't know.

The hatch to the gondola was knocked open, and the surveyors all scrambled up, instruments and notes in hand as they tried to escape the place the zeppelin would land on first. Giovanni turned back to Antonio, who was clutching the rail around the interior of the passenger space with a grimace on his face as he watched the ground sway closer, and yelled out "Isn't this supposed to be a balloon-type airship? The engine's only our forward movement, right?"

Antonio shook his head and yelled back "No! With that opening in the gas bag, the only thing keeping us up was the forward propulsion of the engine! Now that that's gone, we're no more fit for the air than a heap of scrap steel!"

Giovanni groaned and snarled "Nice choice of comparison, rich boy."

Antonio turned back, to him, equally pissed, and was about to curse back some rude remark about Giovanni's mother when, with an almighty crash, boom and screech of metal on wood, the zeppelin suddenly hit the canopy of the forest. Antonio tried to yell out "Get away from the windows!" but his voice was lost amongst the noise. Most of the men seemed to know already, however, and were ducking low, away from the sides of the gondola and passenger space as the branches shattered the glass and tore through the aluminum. It seemed to last for an eternity, with the zeppelin going further and further into the trees.

Finally, though, the giant airship broke free of the trees, but continued falling, this time over a cliff and towards a lake. Instantly, everyone switched tactics and, instead of ducking away from the windows, they all perched themselves on the windowsills to await the moment to jump off and head towards the shallows. Some of the soldiers were preparing to strip themselves of their armor, but Giovanni yelled out "No! You'll be needing every piece of equipment you can get! You wanna just throw all your chances of surviving after this out the window?"

The soldiers never got the chance to answer, however, because the zeppelin suddenly flipped around, and the nose of the gasbag hit the water. The passenger and cargo space was thrown up into the air, torn off its supports, and rocketed towards shore. In all the jumble and chaos of the spinning cabins, no one knew where up was, and several people, soldiers and scientists, fell out the windows and towards the water, forty feet below the compartment, then twenty, ten.

At last, with a great crunching sound, the passenger and cargo compartments crashed onto the rocky shore, instantly tearing the two separate. It took about twenty minutes, but finally some of the men decided it would be wise to get moving. Or, they would move properly if they weren't staggering around in dizziness. Several of them fell over and vomited their meager breakfasts. The ones who remained standing with full-stomachs, but by no means any less dizzy, were Giovanni, Antonio and a few other soldiers.

Giovanni took two steps forward, three back, then fell back into a shaky lean against the ruined gondola. He opened his mouth a few times, closed it again, covered it once or twice with his hand, then said, weakly "It's kinda hard for me to…get smashed on booze but…when I am…it kinda feels like this, but a lot better."

Antonio was still standing on two legs, but his eyes were rolling as much as his head was, and he stumbled around all over the place, narrowly avoiding a few soldiers and he said, shakily, "Y'know how you…feel when you…go to the Inve-…the Invention Fair and eat chili dogs…and drink cheap wine all day…long?"

Giovanni swallowed twice before answering "Yeah, I do."

Antonio groaned, finally halting his staggering as he bent over, clutching his stomach as he hissed "I wish I felt that good right now…" before he emptied his stomach all over the floor.

Nothing was said for another half-hour while the men regained their strength of stomach, knees and mind and managed to stay standing straight for more than two minutes. Surprisingly enough, Giovanni and Antonio had about sixty percent of their men still standing before them, most of them being the soldiers. In the Vinci highlands, the country across the sea where these men came from, it was highly unlikely that more than forty percent of the passengers would survive. However, the men before them totaled up to about a hundred and thirty out of the two hundred that had started the expedition. Most of the casualties were the zeppelin crew, most of which had still been down at the steam engine when the compartments had been ripped off, and all of the surveyors who had scrambled towards the back as well. One look over at the lake and the now flaming gas-bag told them that those who had managed to hang on weren't alive anymore.

Antonio shook his head, mostly to get the last of the dizziness out of his system, then said, in a voice still a little hoarse from his upchuck, "Alright! Let's get over to the cargo and check everything. Hopefully the magazine's still intact and the clockworks survived. Giovanni," the major nodded to show he was listening, arms crossed over his chest as he stood there. He was an imposing figure, but Antonio was in charge of this expedition. He was just here to make sure the kid didn't get killed.

Antonio continued. "How much powder do you think we should take?"

Giovanni cleared his throat to get some of the bile out and responded "Well, each man can carry about seventy rounds in their ammo packs, and enough for twice that much in their powder flasks in their packs. However, they can only carry enough metallic parts for about thirty rounds. It's not the powder that's the problem, we'll probably have enough of that for a while, it's the casing and bullets."

Antonio nodded and said "Well, we'll probably have to deal with that when the time comes. Rally the men, I'll go with the crew we have left and check on the clockworks."

Giovanni nodded, and Antonio gestured to the five men remaining from the zeppelin crew, who followed him over to the cargo compartment. Twenty military scouts and one hundred and five soldiers remained, and Giovanni addressed these men.

"Alright, boys, form up! We'll be going over in pack lines so that we can get all the materials out before we start arming ourselves. I repeat, ALL arms and ammunition are to be out of the magazine before we start loading up. Is that clear?"

"Sir, YESSIR!" the soldiers responded.

None of them were at attention, but they had all formed up into twenty one squads of five, with the scouts making five squads of four. Giovanni nodded and said "Alright then! Scouts, start securing a perimeter and find some trails outta here for us. If you find any life forms, DO NOT engage. Simply avoid them and include them in your report. Soldiers, move out!"

The scouts split up and went in different directions while the soldiers followed the major over towards the cargo, where Antonio, covered in grease, was just emerging. Giovanni signaled to his soldiers, who began forming pack lines while ten of them went inside to start fetching flintlock-repeaters and ammo. The major turned to the expedition financier and asked "Well, what happened?"

Antonio had already strapped on two flintlock revolvers in shoulder holsters, and was finishing loading one while he responded "Well, one of the Spiders got crushed and one of the Men is damaged but still operational. They're fixing it up now. So, we still got one Clockwork Spider and three operational Clockwork Men."

Giovanni nodded and said "Eh, good, good. They strapping in already?"

Antonio shrugged and said "I know the Spider crew wanted to make sure all the limbs were functional, but as far as I could tell, all the guys crewing the Men are helping fix that damaged one."

Suddenly, behind them, a loud clicking and whirring rang out from inside the cargo compartment, and the major looked behind Antonio with a grin on his face as the teenager calmly slipped the last cartridge into his revolver and said "There they are."

A giant mechanical spider, at least twelve feet high, stepped out on eight mechanical legs, supporting a cockpit in which the pilot sat, working the levers, while the gunner sat up over the clockwork motor, hanging onto the flak cannon mounted on top.

Behind it strode three other metal beings, each just barely topping sixteen feet, with no feet, simply stilts that could bend at the knee joints. They were actually clockwork battle suits, with a crew member inside each one. The left hand had three claw like fingers for melee attacks while the left had an electrical gun, effective only at close, close range. Up where a head was supposed to be, there was a square of metal with a large floodlight in the center.

All four of these clockwork monstrosities stepped out onto the soil, leaving holes roughly the size of a man's handprint.

Antonio turned to Giovanni and grinned before saying "Let's get your men geared up, and then we'll go out and tackle the New World, shall we?"

(What do you think? Is it crap? Worth continuing? Let me know, and if you have any input, I'll be gald to fix a few things to keep it afloat, but not too much.)


End file.
